Mr Balfour's Poodle(9)

‘The Opposition is lamentably weak in the House of Commons and enormously powerful in the House of Lords. It is essential that the two wings of the army should work together, and that neither House should take up a line of its own without carefully considering the effects which the adoption of such a line might have upon the other House. In dealing with such Bills as the Trades Disputes Bill or the Robartes Bill, I cannot help thinking that the leaders in the House of Commons should have before them at the very outset a definite idea of the treatment which the question might receive in the event of either of those Bills coming before the House of Lords later in the session. Similarly, there are very important questions which will from time to time be debated in the House of Lords and which should be discussed with an eye to the effect of the discussion upon the temper of the House of Commons. At this moment no such machinery as I have suggested is in existence.

‘Mr. Balfour might like to call a few of us together after the holidays in order to consider the procedure which might be adopted.

‘I should myself be inclined to propose that he should institute a not too numerous Committee, including, say, four or five members of each House, who might meet in his room at the House of Commons, once a week at least, for an exchange of ideas.…

‘As a House of Lords’ delegation I would suggest Lord Halsbury, Lord Cawdor, Lord Salisbury, and myself.’1b

Balfour replied on April 13, hedging on Lansdowne’s specific proposal, but going on to a general analysis of the position.

‘The real point is, as you truly say, to secure that the party in the two Houses shall not work as two separate armies, but shall co-operate in a common plan of campaign. This is all-important. There has certainly never been a period in our history in which the House of Lords will be called upon to play a part at once so important, so delicate, and so difficult.… I conjecture that the Government methods of carrying on their legislative work will be this: they will bring in Bills in a much more extreme form than the moderate members of their Cabinet probably approve: the moderate members will trust to the House of Lords cutting out or modifying the most outrageous provisions: the Left Wing of the Cabinet, on the other hand, while looking forward to the same result, will be consoled for the anticipated mutilation of their measures by the reflection that they will be gradually accumulating a case against the Upper House, and that they will be able to appeal at the next election for a mandate to modify its constitution.

‘This scheme is an ingenious one, and it will be our business to defeat it as far as we can.

‘I do not think the House of Lords will be able to escape the duty of making serious modifications in important Government measures, but, if this is done with caution and tact, I do not believe that they will do themselves any harm. On the contrary, as the rejection of the Home Rule Bill undoubtedly strengthened their position, I think it is quite possible that your House may come out of the ordeal strengthened rather than weakened by the inevitable difficulties of the next few years.

‘It is, of course, impossible to foresee how each particular case is to be dealt with, but I incline to advise that we should fight all points of importance very stiffly in the Commons, and should make the House of Lords the theatre of compromise. It is evident that you can never fight for a position which we have surrendered; while, on the other hand, the fact that we have strenuously fought for the position and been severely beaten may afford adequate ground for your making a graceful concession to the Representative Chamber.’c

Lord Lansdowne’s biographer comments that the ‘only flaw’ in this exposition was the view that the Upper House might emerge from the struggle with its position strengthened; but others may take the view that Balfour’s calm assumption that half the Liberal Cabinet did not believe in the measures which he himself found distasteful—a not untypical Tory illusion—was equally dangerous.

The Education Bill, after its second reading on May 10, was bogged down in committee for twenty parliamentary days and its emergence at the end of this period was only secured by an extensive use of the guillotine. It was given a third reading on July 30 by 369 to 177, but the shadow of the House of Lords lay heavily upon the debate on this occasion. J. A. Spender, in his life of Campbell-Bannerman, has told us that ‘Liberals, seeing their overwhelming preponderance in the House of Commons, found it difficult to believe that the Peers would venture even the one stroke (the attack on the Education Bill).…’d This may have been the view at the beginning of the session, but it had certainly changed by the time that the bill reached its final stage in the Commons. Balfour, in a famous passage of his speech, expressed his view that ‘the real discussion of this question is not now in this House and has not been for some time; the real discussion must be elsewhere; and everybody is perfectly reconciled to the fact that another place is going to deal with large tracts of the Bill which we have not found time even to touch upon … it is in the highest degree improbable that the Bill will come back in the shape in which it leaves us. The honourable Gentleman who has just sat down controverted a prophecy of mine that the Bill will never pass. Does he think the Bill will ever pass? I do not think he or anybody else does.’e Birrell was naturally more cautious, but his words implied no great confidence in the future of the bill, while a Liberal backbencher, the radical and Anglo-Catholic Charles Masterman,1 said that ‘they were sending the Bill to another place knowing that large changes would be made there and were prepared to accept at least a certain number of those changes.… It was sad to think that this great democratic movement … should have as one of its first results the fact that 2,500,000 Catholics and a more indefinite number of Liberals were saying: “Thank God for the institution of the House of Lords.” ’f